AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘I invited you to dinner, remember?’ He came over to stand beside her, his thigh almost brushing her shoulder as he looked down at the cheerfully threshing baby.
‘And I distinctly remember refusing,’ she replied, but her rejection lacked enthusiasm. She knew she didn’t stand a chance against that air of steely determination. Besides, she was hungry, so why shouldn’t she let him feed her? Perhaps he even meant it as a peace-offering, she thought with unwarranted optimism as she folded the nappy across Ivan’s hips, deftly avoiding his churning legs.
Knowing she was being closely observed made her un-characteristically clumsy. ‘Ouch!’ She had jabbed herself with one of the safety-pins and dropped it on the floor as a small spot of blood welled out of her thumb.
Hunter crouched down beside her and picked up the pin, nudging her aside with his broad shoulder. ‘Here. Let me. You set the table.’
She watched suspiciously as he completed the task with surprising speed. ‘Have you got nephews and nieces?’
‘I’m an only child. I do, however, have a functioning brain and reasonable hand-eye co-ordination. What goes on next?’
Oh, so he thought it was that simple, did he? She rose to her feet and told him, then lingered to watch, hoping to find something to criticise, but he was as quick and competent at the task as he seemed to be at almost everything else and she found herself fascinated at the way the big hands handled the wriggling baby’s un- cooperative limbs, gently but firmly threading them into the stretchy towelling sleep-suit.
‘Will he go to sleep now, or watch us eat?’
As if he understood, Ivan tucked a thumb in his mouth and looked at them through drooping eyelids.
‘Well, he doesn’t usually go to sleep right away,’ Anne lied.
Ivan closed his eyes and an angelic smile slackened around the thumb.
‘That tooth will probably keep him awake for ages,’ she added hopefully.
Ivan began to snore.
Still crouching, Hunter swayed back to look up at Anne’s frustrated expression, the muscles of his thighs bulging against the taut linen of his trousers with the action. ‘Mmm. If you think we need a chaperon perhaps we could prop his eyes open with toothpicks.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Anne, although he wasn’t far off the mark. It wasn’t a chaperon she wanted, it was a distraction. Spending the evening as the sole focus of Hunter Lewis’s suspicions was hardly her idea of relaxing.
Once again she discovered that she had underestimated him. For all his volatile temper and impatient directness, Hunter now proved himself capable of alarming subtlety.
While she tucked Ivan into his cot and wheeled it into the bedroom Hunter found the crockery and cutlery, apparently as at home in her kitchen as he was in his own. There were no wine glasses, only tumblers, and when she sat down Anne found that only one of them contained wine. The glass in front of her plate was brimming with chilled milk.
‘I know breast-feeding mothers are advised to avoid alcohol,’ Hunter commented piously when he saw her brief frown. ‘I hope you don’t mind my drinking in front of you?’
‘Of course not,’ said Anne, longing to dump the milk over his know-it-all head. She loved good red wine but was rarely able to afford to drink it and the bottle he had brought was a Premier Cru. She sneaked another wistful look at the label as she picked up her glass and glumly sipped her milk.
She cheered up as she tucked into the fettucine, remembering at the first, heady taste of sauce that he had added a good slug of red wine to it, probably from that very same superior bottle. She relaxed even more when Hunter began to talk casually of trivialities, entertaining her with some pithy descriptions of campus life. Anne was entranced, tipsy with the knowledge that this was now her world too, and she was soon chattering with her usual friendly enthusiasm, so that she hardly noticed when the conversation crept around to the personal. As long as they kept away from the subject of books and writing and
Ivan she was cheerfully under the illusion that she was revealing nothing about herself as she talked about her mother’s accident and the years of recovery, her father’s love of the land and the character quirks of her four rowdy brothers.
‘You sound like a very close family.’
‘Do we?’ Anne had never thought about it before. They were just…family. ‘I suppose so…if that means that we’re always there for each other. Isn’t yours?’
He ignored the invitation to be similarly confiding. ‘And were they there for you when Ivan was born?’
Alarm bells began to ring. Anne concentrated intently on her plate, winding a curl of fettucine around her fork. ‘They all love Ivan as much as I do. He’s my parents’ first grandchild, you know. Don is engaged and Rex and Ken have steady girlfriends, but late marriages seem to run in the Tremaine family. Mum and Dad didn’t get married until they were…’ She stopped, aware that she was starting to babble under that steady, dark-eyed stare.
‘How did they feel about your coming to Auckland?’
‘Oh, they were glad for me,’ she said truthfully. ‘Mum especially. She knows I always wanted to go to u—’ she had been about to say ‘university’ and switched it to, ‘You know—uh, the city and write…’
‘They must miss you both.’
‘Oh, I didn’t live at home any more, anyway,’ she said hurriedly, crossing her fingers under the overhanging rim of her plate. ‘But yes, they must do—I’ve received a letter from home practically every other day!’ She laughed to counteract a small pang of homesickness. ‘I don’t think it really sank in for them that there might be anything to worry about until I had actually left.’ All her parents’ worries had at that stage been directed towards Katlin. They trusted Anne to behave sensibly whereas they despaired of ever understanding the behaviour of her unpredictable sister. ‘Mum’s never lived in a city in her life but suddenly she’s an expert on life in the fast lane. She keeps sending me newspaper and magazine clippings about coping with life in the urban jungle and I get regular care packages of home cooking. She has this vision of city people as cold and uncaring. She doesn’t seem to realise that the people here are the same as they are anywhere else, there are just more of them…’
‘An innocent abroad,’ Hunter murmured. ‘No wonder they’re worried.’
